While looking at domains, you might come across the name "ICANN" -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This organization accredits some registrars that agree to a set of operational standards, but ICANN accreditation isn't required to sell domains, nor is it necessarily a sign of a company with good customer service. In fact, ICANN plays no role in the sale of many top-level domains, including country-specific domains.
Every time you visit a website, your computer performs what's called a "DNS lookup". When you manage a domain with us, you get to use the same DNS servers as Google. This means your domain name will connect quickly and reliably to your website. We include 10 million resolutions per year for each domain you register with Google Domains. Learn more in the Help Center.
The one-page website is really the first step in building your online presence, allowing you to gain experience in the online world, as well as link your business to Google's My Business quickly and easily. The one-page packages are simple and have a load of preset layouts for you to choose from, making the setup very easy. We recommend this for people starting out with their first online projects.

During the 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting in Paris in 2008,[10] ICANN started a new process of TLD naming policy to take a "significant step forward on the introduction of new generic top-level domains." This program envisions the availability of many new or already proposed domains, as well as a new application and implementation process.[11] Observers believed that the new rules could result in hundreds of new top-level domains to be registered.[12] In 2012, the program commenced, and received 1930 applications.[13] By 2016, the milestone of 1000 live gTLD was reached.

For the most part, you can pick whichever TLD you prefer, though a few have restrictions -- you can't buy a .edu domain unless you run an accredited post-secondary school. Many, but not all, country-specific domains (.us, .uk, .jp) are restricted to citizens of the country in question. Unrestricted country domains are often used for "domain hacks," where the extension becomes part of the title, such as YouTube's alternate address, "youtu.be."
The practice of using a simple memorable abstraction of a host's numerical address on a computer network dates back to the ARPANET era, before the advent of today's commercial Internet. In the early network, each computer on the network retrieved the hosts file (host.txt) from a computer at SRI (now SRI International),[4][5] which mapped computer host names to numerical addresses. The rapid growth of the network made it impossible to maintain a centrally organized hostname registry and in 1983 the Domain Name System was introduced on the ARPANET and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 882 and RFC 883.
The root is the upper-most part of the DNS hierarchy, and involves delegating administrative responsibility of “top-level domains”, which are the last segment of a domain name, such as .com, .uk and .nz. Part of our tasks includes evaluating requests to change the operators of country code domains, as well as day-to-day maintenance of the details of the existing operators.
SnapNames is a web domain name marketplace - meaning that they only deal specifically with domains that are currently owned by somebody else. They offer daily and premium auctions, private brokerage of domains, and buy-it-now listings for buying and selling domain names, including over 30 million domain names that aren't all, as you'll find on some services, exorbitant. They have over three million customers, including a significant number of small businesses, which is worth it.
Even if the term isn’t trademarked, don’t buy domains that are just a variation of another domain name. This means avoiding plurals if the singular is taken (mediatemple.net vs. mediatemples.net), hyphenating a phrase (media-temple.net), or adding “my” or some other preposition (mymediatemple.net). Alternately, you might consider buying these variations yourself and set them up so that if someone types one of the variations, they are redirected to your main site.
Most people assume a domain name ends in .com so if you buy a domain name with one of the other extensions (.net, .info, .org, etc.), you’ll have some extra work to get people to remember that your site has a different extension. Don’t automatically assume you should only buy domains with .com, though. Many sites have done quite well with other extensions. (Look at us!)
ICANN renewed Verisign’s .com contract, this time with an interesting new clause — the $6 cap previously placed on Verisign’s fee was removed, granting permission for Verisign to raise their fee by 7% each year from 2007 to 2010, bringing it to $7.85. The justification given by ICANN was “to allow market forces to determine prices”, which I don’t quite follow, but I’m no Keynes. They also point out, in subtler language, that it’s the US government’s job to worry about Verisign’s monopoly, which is, I guess, fair.
Some domain names are only available at auction. For now, we’ve chosen to feature buy it now domain names because they are often available immediately. We are working to improve our search engine to make it easier for advanced users to choose whether they want to include domains at auction (or domains with hyphens and numbers) in the search results.

Domain names can be used in a number of ways. Direct visitors to your website’s home page or use complementary domains to send them to specific areas of your website ( e.g. yourcompany.jobs for a careers page). Or, forward a custom domain to an existing social media account, like your Twitter profile or Periscope channel. With a domain name you can even set up custom email addresses like yourname@yoursite.social, which can be used to conduct business or communicate with your followers. More.